The Stroop Color-Word Test was administered to 1,856 cognitively screened, healthy Dutch speaking participants aged 24 to 81 years. The effects of age, gender, and education on Stroop test performance were investigated to adequately stratify the normative data. The results showed that especially the speed-dependent Stroop scores (time to complete a subtest), rather than the accuracy measures (t...

This study investigated effects of cross-language similarity on within- and between-language Stroop interference and facilitation in three groups of trilinguals. Trilinguals were either proficient in three languages that use the same-script (alphabetic in German-English-Dutch trilinguals), two similar scripts and one different script (Chinese and alphabetic scripts in Chinese-English-Malay tril...

Accounts of the Stroop effect postulate that participants read the words despite instructions to ignore them and focus on the print colour. Recent research, however, suggests that context and task demands can moderate the extent of reading in Stroop experiments (e.g., Melara & Algom, 2003). In the current study we employ an innovative experimental methodology to investigate the depth and freque...

The emotional Stroop task has been the most widely used task to examine attentional bias to emotionally salient stimuli. In one format of this task, words are presented to participants in a mixed randomized or quasi-randomized sequence. Using a mixed smoking Stroop task, we have previously demonstrated that smokers are slower to respond to words which follow smoking-related words than words whi...

Blood pressure, heart rate, rate pressure product, heart rate variability, stroke volume, cardiac output, peripheral resistance, and cardiac contractility derived from impedance cardiography were obtained from 15 young and 15 old males during and after the Stroop task. The old group demonstrated significantly higher absolute heart rate, systolic and mean arterial pressure, peripheral resistance...

The role of Stroop processes in the emotional Stroop effect was subjected to a conceptual scrutiny augmented by a series of experiments entailing reading or lexical decision as well as color naming. The analysis showed that the Stroop effect is not defined in the emotional Stroop task. The experiments showed that reading, lexical decision, and color naming all are slower with emotional words an...

Sensory or input factors can influence the strength of interference in the classic Stroop color-word task. Specifically, in a single-trial computerized version of the Stroop task, when color-word pairs were incongruent, opponent color pairs (e.g., the word BLUE in yellow) showed reduced Stroop interference compared with nonopponent color pairs (e.g., BLUE in red). In addition, participants' col...

Depression has been associated with increased response times at the incongruent-, neutral-, and negative-word trials of the classical and emotional Stroop tasks (Epp et al., Clinical Psychology Review, 32, 316-328, 2012). Response-time slowdown effects at incongruent- and negative-word trials of the Stroop tasks were reported to correlate with depressive severity, indicating strong relevance of...

The idea that picture-word interference (PWI) and the Stroop effect are two manifestations of the same process has been widely accepted. However, recently Dell’Acqua and colleagues (2007) have questioned the identical nature of the Stroop effect and picture-word interference, based on the observation that the loci of both effects in the mental processing stream differ. In this paper, we will pr...